Audio has the power to emotionally move us, but Schweppes and Ampiano artist Daliwonga partnered together to actually move music fans physically from one place to another.

The Social Sound is an immersive audio-led experience that encouraged consumers in Cape Town to go out and socialize. We meticulously engineered Daliwonga’s track “Howa You” with spatial audio linked to the listener’s GPS location in real time. Binaural sound indicated where in the city to turn, left from the left headphone, right from the right headphone, guiding them to a live performance found only by listening to the music.

Schweppes, a brand that stands for socialising, found that 73% of adults admit to using noise canceling headphones to avoid social interaction. So we decided to step in, by getting inside the headphones themselves.

Amapiano, a Nguni word loosely translated to “the pianos” is a subgenre of house music that emerged in South Africa in the mid 2010s. It is a hybrid of deep house, jazz, Zulu, and lounge music characterized by synths and wide, percussive basslines. It grew in popularity in social media and digital streaming platforms, allowing artists to connect with new audiences and build their followings at a local level and expanding their influence globally. Over the past two years alone, Spotify has recorded 563% streaming growth in Amapiano as the genre is becoming increasingly popular.

Daliwonga began singing in his school choir and is now one of the top Amapiano artists today at the forefront of bringing Amapiano into the spotlight. In his own words, the genre is “an original sound from South Africa, and I’m proud of saying that.” The emphasis on melody over vocals means that it’s a highly danceable beat and popular in festivals, dance halls/clubs, and among both DJs and live shows alike–making it the perfect sound for our immersive audio experience encouraging socialization in Cape Town.

While people walked through the city center with their headphones in Cape Town, acclaimed Soweto-born singer/songwriter Daliwonga invited them via a live instagram stream to an exclusive concert at a secret venue you could only find if you followed the music. We turned headphones into a sonic GPS, creating the first-of-its-kind sound navigation system linking geolocation to specially designed 360 degree audio. If fans heard the sound from the left, they turned left. From the right, they turned right. The music was entirely immersive and reacted in real time to the listener’s positioning, even coming from behind them if they went off track in the wrong direction. And the closer they got to the secret location, the louder and fuller the sound, clueing them in which direction to go along pedestrian walkways.

In 2023 Schweppes launched their new global brand platform “Born Social,” a reminder to the world to live life as they were born—social. The brand needed an impactful activation to launch this platform and serve as a pilot that could be implemented in other markets around the world.

From a business perspective, increased socialising means more consumption, and the marketing objective was to boost the salience of the Born Social platform, enticing our audience to overcome routine defaults that prevent them from being in the mindset to get social.

Our main goal was to bring outsized attention to the brand’s new global brand platform “Born Social.” We increased nationwide social conversation around the brand 5,805% and received 10,500% more mentions than the competitor brand, with our total social reach for the one day event hitting 1,817,532. This made #Schweppes the trending topic on Twitter/X for 6 days in a row in South Africa.

We packed the secret venue (limited to 300 people for this exclusive event) with an average audio duration of 18 minutes 54 seconds for the headphones experience. The Social Sound gained earned media coverage in National TV News Broadcast SABC TrendzLive reaching 11.8M people, digital coverage including BizCommunity, Carve Africa, and Cypress Live reaching 13.5M people, and national and local radio, including Heart FM “Cape Town’s Beat,” The Switch station’s “Heart Squad,” Good Hope FM, and 5FM South Africa.

This was the first time spatial audio has been uniquely engineered to track GPS coordinates, creating the sonic version of a breadcrumb trail. Local Amapiano sensation Daliwonga invited his Instagram fans to meet him IRL at a live show, simply by syncing their headphones to our experience in the city center. We then used his hit song “Howa You” as the backing track and guided fans through the city using 360 audio, as the music reacted in real time to their GPS position.

The sound design was meticulously crafted to build momentum for the live performance. We deconstructed Daliwonga's track into six distinct stems–bass, drums, FX, music, melody, percussion and vocals–each layer building as the listener progressed toward the destination. We used custom rendered impulse response, real-time convolution, carefully defined filtering, and binaural spatialization to create a cinematic and anticipatory feeling in the audio experience.